After the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused the collapse of the 110-story World Trade Center towers, the authorities contacted the offices of Leslie E. Robertson, the leading structural engineer behind the complex. Their hope was to study how the structures had been designed, understand the causes that had brought to their collapse and locate survivors or missing people.
This is how Basia and Leonard Myszynski's documentary "Leaning Out" - focusing on the story of the Twin Towers, from their planning to their collapse - opens.
Architect Minoru Yamasaki, better known as "Yama", who had designed the Seattle-based IBM Building, was commissioned the project. Moving from the ideas and concepts behind the IBM Building, but also bearing in mind the diagonal structure leaning on two points of the United Steelworkers Building in Pittsburgh, Yama tried to devise a skyscraper that incorporated more steel than glass.
Young engineer Leslie Robertson was selected by Worthington, Skilling, Helle, and Jackson (WSHJ) to participate in the design of the World Trade Center.
Conceived in the '60s and completed in 1971, the construction became the fulcrum of the lives of the people involved in the project.
This part of the film is extremely interesting for architecture and engineering students: the directors show indeed how the team behind the WTC examined different natural phenomena and the impact they may have had on the buildings to try and understand how the extremely tall towers may have also guaranteed a greater stability to the people moving and working inside them.
Robertson did a series of wind tunnel studies with models to research issues of elasticity, but also put people in motion simulators to see how they reacted. Dampers were eventually integrated in the structure to absorb the swept of the wind, while narrow windows delineated by structural elements around the perimeter were favoured as they offered people working in the building a heightened sense of safety thanks to the closely spaced steel pipes. Load-bearing columns were then placed around the perimeter of each building, a solution that allowed engineers to eliminate all columns within the office space.
Everything they did on the two buildings was extremely new and required so much time that planning the towers ended up having an impact on Robertson's private life and marriage and he divorced from his first wife.
When the towers were finished the WTC received a lot of negative feedback: their austere rectangular structures brutally modified the New York skyline. The towers seemed just interested in themselves and were not engaging in an architectural dialogue with the buildings around them. Yet, when, fascinated by the negative space separating the towers, high wire artist Philippe Petit decided to walk in between the towers, the public perception of the structures started changing. Petit felt indeed that the buildings were alive and soon the locals started agreeing with him, feeling that the towers may have represented an occasion of rebirth for the Lower Manhattan area.
The directors offer an interlude at this point in the film to look at Robertson's life after finishing the WTC: he married Malaysian-born engineer SawTeen See, who became his partner in life and in his firm as well, making him more sensitive to women's point of view in architecture and building, in the meantime his practice went on to develop other projects.
Basia and Leonard Myszynski offer at this point a quick insight into some of the other buildings and structures Robertson's office worked on, among them Puerta de Europa in Madrid, Spain, relying on an ingenious system that controls lateral deflections; the Sony Building in New York, the Miho Museum Bridge in Shigaraki, Japan, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (both with I. M. Pei as architect), and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, well-known for its sword-shaped silhouette made more futuristic and less threatening by its supporting horizontal sequence of diamonds.
The documentary then reshifts the attention on the WTC: a bomb detonated in the basement of the North Tower in 1993, representing a first cause of major worries for Robertson, but 9/11 was an entirely different situation and caused a major trauma in his life.
While his wife and team watched what was happening from their offices located a few blocks from the Twin Towers, Robertson was following the events on a TV screen in Hong Kong.
In 1945 a B-25 crashed into the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors of the Empire State Building, killing fourteen people, so while working on the WTC, Robertson had considered what may have happened if a building had been hit by a plane, but he designed the towers to withstand a Boeing 707 and not two fully-fuelled 767s travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.
Via archival images, footage and interviews, the directors attempt a reconstruction of what happened: the plane hit a number of external columns, the gravity loads were redistributed, but jet-fuel fires spread through, affecting the steel that rapidly lost its strength. The buildings couldn't stand the load anymore and collapsed, killing 2,754 people.
Robertson lost his joy after the Twin Towers collapsed: known for his humanity, his commitment to pacifism and organising marches for the abolition of nuclear warfare, he was deeply shaken, devastated and traumatised by the event, and started feeling guilty and responsible for what had happened, wondering if he may have saved more people.
As investigations proceeded it was eventually proved that the way the towers had been built gave enough time to people to safely evacuate the buildings.
Though the towers destruction felt like losing a child for Robertson, the engineer, who turned 90 this year, managed to find his strength back.
Inspired by one of the principles he applied to some of the structures he worked - leaning out (if you're climbing and you lean in you easily slip and fall, but if you lean out you drive your feet into the rock and your hands are in tension, so you can hold on) - he went on to work on further projects, including the Shanghai World Financial Center and Seoul's Lotte World Tower, one of the ten tallest buildings in the world.
"Leaning Out" is not your average film about a starchitect, but it is an investigation with a human dimension, exploring not just structural engineeering, but looking at the work of a man whose life seems suspended between art and science and whose life story went from triumph through trauma to resilience.
Though the documentary focuses on the Twin Towers, it also indirectly points at other similar tragedies (think about the Morandi Bridge in Genoa and how the structure based on a revolutionary system that was supposed to represent the Italian boom when it was built, ended up causing death and devastation in August this year), becoming a call for the public to pay more attention and get more interested in the architectures surrounding us rather than waiting until a building collapses or is destroyed by a major disaster. So while the film is centred on an iconic project, it looks at the lessons you may learn from life.
Produced by the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Leaning Out" premieres at the Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF), in New York, running from 16th to 21st October.
Curated by founder and director Kyle Bergman, the event, currently in its tenth year, will include this year over 30 feature-length and short films, two world premieres and two U.S. premieres.
"Leaning Out" will be screened at the SVA Theatre and will be followed by a reception at the Cinépolis Chelsea, with two special guests - Leslie E. Robertson and SawTeen See.
Image credits for this post
1. "Leaning Out" Poster
2. Young Leslie Robertson with WTC sketch. Courtesy Leslie Robertson
3. WTC Twin Tower models / Wind engineering animation
4. Twin Towers in orange light. Courtesy Leslie Robertson
5. Leslie Robertson and SawTeen See in hardhats on construction site, NYC. Photo credit: Leonard Myszynsky
6. I. M. Pei and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum
7. Puerta de Europa, Madrid, Spain, aerial view
8. Still from "Leaning Out". Photo Credit: Leonard Myszynsky
9 - 12. The Twin Towers after the 9/11 attacks. Photo by Jan Szumanski
13. Pei Partnership Architects, Leslie Robertson and SawTeen See
14. Shanghai World Financial Center, aerial view. Courtesy KPF
15. Lotte Tower, aerial view. Courtesy of KPF
16. Leslie Robertson and SawTeen standing in snow by a steel beam from WTC, "Leaning Out". Photo Credit: Leonard Myszynsky
17. Leslie Robertson by a steel beam from WTC, "Leaning Out". Photo Credit: Leonard Myszynsky
18. Leslie Robertson at anti-war protest, Washington DC, 2007
19. Leslie Robertson with view of New York, "Leaning Out". Photo Credit: Leonard Myszynsky
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